His jaw tensed and he didn’t look at me. “You said that…that you didn’t want to die but you were probably going to…that—” He straightened, tensing, as if he was fighting his own grief with everything that was in him. “That you deserved to die because of what you did…” His voice trailed off, swallowed in emotion. He reached up and angrily swiped the back of his hand across his eyes and I sat back, flabbergasted.
I’d said that? I stared at him, utterly overwhelmed, what he must have gone through, then. The feelings he must have felt—the thoughts that must have run through his mind when I’d said it. He’d been in fear for my life, carrying me, barely conscious, to the ambulance, staying up with me all night in the hospital with my words running through his mind on repeat.
“Adam, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m so sor—”
“Stop it!” he practically shouted in my face and I jumped, pulling back. His fist slammed down in the sand. “Goddamn it, Emilia, if you say you are sorry one more time…”
I held my hand up. “I’m afraid…how about that? I’m afraid about what this has done to us. I’m afraid we don’t know how to fix this…”
“I’m afraid to touch you.”
That hung in the air, thickening it with tension. My mouth opened to reply but nothing came out.
He shook his head and eventually continued. “I can’t go through that again. I can’t watch you go through that again. Every time I touch you—every time I want you, I’m scared shitless that I’m going to put another baby in you and it’s all going to happen again.”
“It doesn’t have to happen again. We’ll be careful…”
“We need help. You need help. Professional help.”
I sat back on my haunches and looked at him. “I’m not—”
“You said you didn’t deserve to live. You need help that I can’t give you.”
“Will that make a difference?” I asked in a tiny voice. “Will it even begin to eliminate the baggage we are carrying?”
He looked away and shrugged. And that shrug did more to me than any of his words previously had done. My gut sank. I felt like I was suffocating. Adam had lost hope. He no longer believed that we could be fixed.
This realization shook me harder than anything because, since the beginning, he had always believed in us. Long before I had ever thought it possible, he’d believed. He’d pursued this relationship because he’d known we were right for each other. He’d known what he wanted. He’d always been so sure of us.
But, apparently, not anymore.
“You’ve lost hope…” I said quietly.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I just feel empty right now. We’re human. We can only take so much. And we’ve had more than our fair share.”
“You said that life isn’t fair. That we don’t get to have everything. But does that mean we don’t get to have anything—that we’ve gone through all that together not to deserve to be happy together?”
He shrugged, shaking his head.
I wanted to cry again. I felt lost, cut adrift. My hand wandered to the compass around my neck, my fist closing around it. We’d lost our way. We were drifting aimlessly.
I watched him and he didn’t move, his hands fisted in the sand, leaning back on stiff arms, staring out over the black water. The water lapped against the shore. I could hear the song of frogs coming down from the wetlands. People were talking out on their patios on the other side of the Back Bay. But between us? Dead silence.
Void. Emptiness.
“Adam. I still believe in us,” I whispered. It hurt to put that out there with no idea of how he’d react but the silence between us had hurt worse.
After a long silence he said, “I wish I could say the same. More than anything I wish it.”
Grief seized me then but I didn’t cry. I’d traveled past that stage into a desolate wasteland that was beyond tears. It was dry, empty and lonely, this wasteland. It was a place of my own making and I had no idea how to find my way out. I fingered the compass.
“More than anything, I wish that I had the words to tell you how I feel… about you, about this,” I said.
“But you don’t. And that’s the problem. Because I don’t have those words either.”
Space and time seemed torn and shredded between us. Ripped. An impassible barrier. My throat constricted. “What should we do?”
He turned to me, watched me. “I don’t know. I have to think. You have to think. I’m tired and it’s late and we should sleep.”